So where do you go after last.fm? How do you display the superlative coolness of your musical taste to the world once last.fm is no longer fit to point people at? Well, there's libre.fm, which is still in alpha, doesn't look very good and has next to nobody using it. Libre.fm, though, is open-source, so you could easily run your own server. Perhaps the future will consist of people running their own scrobblers, or social networks providing scrobbling services to their users; your music stats will be available as standard XML feeds, with a XFN-style microformat link from your profile/homepage, letting the world know that this is what you've been listening to. Of course, one advantage a centralised site like last.fm had was that it could easily crunch the data and find recommendations or determine the compatibility of musical tastes, though if it's a web service, someone could write a third-party site to crunch exported music profiles. (Perhaps that someone will be Google or Facebook? Or perhaps Murdoch's struggling MySpace will leap at the opportunity, implement scrobbling, and then make a hash of it with obnoxious in-your-face Flash ads and a garishly unpleasant user experience.) As for finding upcoming gigs, event sites like upcoming.org, or Facebook's Event facility, could be expanded to be aware of band/artist names and search by user profiles.